


Unlikely Allies

by PaperGirlInAPaperTown



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Bullying, But a Helpful Ass, Character Development and Exploration, Completed work to be edited and posted, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Friendship, Gen, Mini-Fic, My OCs are assholes, Pitch makes a weird Guardian, Poor Cupcake, Reformed Pitch, Symbolism is Symbolic, pitch is an ass
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-02-09 20:15:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12895893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaperGirlInAPaperTown/pseuds/PaperGirlInAPaperTown
Summary: A collection of multi-chaptered stories chronicling the Burgess Believers' encounters with an oddly helpful old foe. As they each face their darkest fears, Pitch attempts to reinvent both himself and what it means to be the Boogeyman.Part 1: Cupcake is having trouble at school. The last thing she expects is for the Boogeyman to lend her some help.Part 2: Monty's impending camping trip has him more than a little on edge, which just so happens to summon Pitch. Much to the chagrin of both.





	1. Cupcake: Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a piece that was spawned after a conversation with **Sumi-Sprite** (beta and all-round legend), who mentioned that Pitch might make an interesting 'guardian' for Cupcake, given that they are both a little on the fringes in their own circles. Evidently, I couldn't let the idea go.
> 
> This was intended to be a one-shot, but in true Papers form it got a little too long and will instead be published as three chapters. It is also pre-written! And has an ending! Something new and exciting for me! The next two chapters will be posted in the next week or so after I'm done tweaking them.
> 
> Enjoy!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PART ONE

“I’m telling you, UFOs are out there.” Jamie hauled his books out of his locker and shoved the door closed with a rattling clang.

“I don’t know,” replied Monty as he pushed his thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose for the umpteenth time that morning. “Aliens could exist; NASA documented water ice found on Mars near the Martian equator, so it’s possible. But big metal spaceships in the sky? I dunno, it’s too unreal. There’s a reason why you only hear about that stuff from conspiracy theorists.”

“Really?” Jamie gave his fellow space enthusiast a look. “A UFO would be the most unreal thing you’ve ever seen?”

Titters resounded from Pippa, Caleb, and Claude, and Monty clamped his mouth shut. After ten tedious minutes their morning debate finally had a victor, with time to spare before the first bell of the day called them all into class.

“Sorry, Monty, he got you there,” said Pippa with a shrug. Jamie turned to the girl next to him.

“What do you think, Cupcake?”

The stony-faced ten-year-old fiddling with a bracelet of vividly pink beads was startled out of her resolve, having tuned out of the conversation long before it reached a resolution.

“Uh…”

“UFOs. They’re real, right?” Jamie prompted.

“Oh yeah. Sure, I guess,” she said, though she lacked any sort of conviction. In fact, she sounded completely indifferent. Jamie frowned.

Cupcake wasn’t usually one to talk much. She preferred to listen and chime in when she felt she had something worthwhile to say, but even so she was rarely distracted. All morning she had been glancing down the corridor, seemingly on edge, and for her to become so preoccupied by the students that crowded the halls of Burgess Elementary…it was odd to say the least.

“Everything okay?” Claude asked, having also noticed her odd behaviour.

With all eyes on her, Cupcake felt a blush creep into her cheeks and wanted nothing more than for their suddenly concerned expressions to evaporate into thin air. Still, these were her friends. She could tell them anything…right? She opened her mouth to answer, but before she could speak the bell sounded with a shrill peal. She bit back the words as soon as they rose to her tongue.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, and tucked her binder adorned with stickers under her arm. “I’ve got to go, Ms. Norman’s gonna give me a detention if I’m late again.”

“Yeah, we should go too,” Monty agreed, eyeing with mild apprehension the throng of kids that had spontaneously appeared in lieu of the morning rush. “Bye, Cupcake. See you at lunch.” The others gave her a quick wave and bid their farewells before they disappeared around the corner.

Cupcake was alone.

Setting her jaw and tightening her grip on her binder, she marched in the opposite direction — past the AV room, and drinking fountains, and dwindling crowds milling into classrooms, and almost past…

“Well, look who it is.”

The harsh voice of Mike Henderson made her stomach churn, but still she kept walking. She was soon followed by the rapid squeaking of sneakers giving chase over the linoleum floor, which caused her shoulders to tense. Two boys, even taller than she, rounded and blocked her from moving any farther.

“Where do you think you’re going, _Cupcake_?” Todd Milton asked, a sneer on his scrawny face.

“Class. Get out of my way,” she ordered through gritted teeth.

“Nuh-uh.” Mike crossed his arms and stared her down. “Mr. Rogers put us on bin duty this morning, so we’ve got another ten minutes.”

“Good, maybe you can take yourselves out with the trash,” she said without missing a beat. Mike’s eye slightly twitched when he could come back with nothing wittier. He threw a glare at Todd, warning him not to say anything.

“Fine,” he said. “Guess you’re gonna be extra late this morning.”

Quicker than she could protest, he snatched the binder full of notes out of her arms and tore out the pages of scrawled homework. She only had time to watch as they slipped from his hand and fell…

Fell…

Fell…

To hit the ground in a fluttering explosion of white leaves that scattered in every direction. Tears pricked at Cupcake’s eyelids, threatening to spill, but she would not cry in front of them. Instead, she let her nails dig crescent moons into her palms as she tried to find a way around. They mirrored her every step.

“Why are you doing this?” she demanded. Mike shrugged, his face full of malice.

“Because it’s fun,” he said.

“Hey, you know why everyone calls her ‘Cupcake’?” Todd laughed to his accomplice.

“Duh, it’s ‘cause she eats so many of them,” he jeered while he jabbed her in the stomach. Hard.

Mike Henderson never knew what hit him. 

 

— O —

 

Cupcake slumped in the passenger seat of the car and slammed the door shut.

“The principal’s office?!” her mother exclaimed as they pulled away from the curb. “You got sent to the principal’s office? Unbelievable…”

“He started it,” Cupcake said, staring listlessly out the window while the streets rolled by.

“Oh no, you do not get to use that tone with me. You _punched_ him, according to the phone call I just received not half an hour ago.”

“Because he poked me!”

“So, you go and hit him?! Honey, I have told you so many times, you can’t overreact like this. It’s going to get you in serious trouble! You’re lucky Mr. Randal only chose to suspend you for the rest of the day.”

“But what am I supposed to do, Mom? It’s not fair!” she cried. “Everyday it’s like this. They keep picking on me and I’ve told them to stop, but they don’t listen. They _never_ listen!”

The car slowed and came to a stop when they pulled over to the side of the street. Her mother was silent for a moment. Cupcake waited for the world to come crashing down.

“Everyday?” her mother asked quietly.

That wasn’t the reaction Cupcake had been expecting. She threw her mother an uncertain glance, then gave a sharp nod.

“How long has this been happening?”

“About a week. Maybe two,” she answered stiffly.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Cupcake shrugged. “Didn’t want to worry you again,” she mumbled.

Her mother breathed a long sigh and pushed back her hair. “Well, beating up this Mike kid has done the opposite of that,” she said, to which Cupcake grimaced.

“Are you mad?” she asked. Her mother shook her head.

“No, I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed. Honey, it’s important you tell me these things so we can figure out a way to fix them. I can’t help if you don’t talk to me. Do those friends you told me about — Pippa, Jamie and the rest — do they know?”

Cupcake shook her head and fiddled with the hem of her skirt. “No. It always happens after the bell, when they’ve already gone. I think Mike and Todd do that on purpose. They like to make me late. And make fun of me.”

Her mother nodded, and Cupcake noticed her hand was gripping the steering wheel. But when her mother turned to face her, the smile she wore was significantly kinder.

“Then maybe the first thing to do is tell them.” 

 

— O —

 

After a grilled cheese sandwich, Cupcake was sent up to her room to do homework for the rest of the evening. She was still in trouble, though at least now her mother understood why she had ‘acted out’. She didn’t mind; it was worth having been able to deck that annoying leech square in his smug face.

Now she was lying in bed. Her stuffed unicorn was tucked under her arm while she waited for the Sandman’s golden dreams to light the inky night. She usually liked to watch them stream across the sky through her window for the brief few minutes before she drifted off to sleep.

Only, tonight she had a feeling his dreams wouldn’t be enough to silence the thoughts clattering around her head.

_“The first thing to do is tell them…”_

Tell her friends that the two most popular boys in fourth grade were picking on her, when there were rumours no doubt flying that she had thrown the first punch; rumours that she had knocked Mike Henderson unconscious with blood streaming out of his nose, while a distraught Todd Milton ran for help. Cupcake shifted and tried to ignore the way her stomach was tying itself in knots. The pinky hue of the wall she faced was darkened to a gloomy mauve by her own restless shadow.

Would they believe her? It wasn’t as though they had been her friends for very long. Since just before Easter, really. Sure Jamie, Pippa, Claude, Caleb and Monty were all nice. They tried to make her feel included, tried to make her forget she was slightly older and had been the last to join their group. But Cupcake knew, after what happened at her last school, that friends seemed to vanish very quickly after the school bullies decided you were the latest punching bag.

And Mike and Todd had already made their decision, hadn’t they?

The thought of facing those boys again sent an icy chill through her. After what happened that morning, their daily ambushes would only become more aggressive, as would their jeers about how strange she was compared to the rest of Burgess Elementary. Her mother had always advised that ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,’ but those boys knew as well as she did that words had the power to leave their own scars.

No way, Mike and Todd had once told her. No way could her friends actually _want_ to be friends with her. She was the unicorn freak, adopted into a group of marginally lesser freaks. Admittedly though, Pippa was sort of cool, as were Caleb and Claude. They would be the first to up and leave, followed closely by Monty. Though if all else failed, at least Jamie Bennet was insane enough to keep her around.

Or maybe not even Jamie.

Maybe that’s all he saw her as, too. The not-so-girly girl, all alone, lost in a big school, only asked to play out of pity. Certainly, the others must have thought so. They must have realised at some point that she was not one of them.

But maybe she never had been.

Maybe the adventure they had shared over Easter was just a dream. A figment of her imagination’s wishful thinking. It never happened. There was no such thing as Santa Clause, or the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy, or Jack Frost, or the Sandman. They were fantasies too ridiculous to be real. And were she to ask her friends if they had sledded through the town with a flying boy past their bedtimes on a school night, they wouldn’t just laugh, they would side with Mike and Todd and shun her as the social pariah she inevitably always became and the ground would open its gaping maw to swallow her whole while they looked on and mocked the pitiful girl who still beli—

Cupcake jolted awake with a yelp and sat bolt upright. Her heart hammered away in her chest, it almost hurt for how hard it was beating.

It was a dream.

Just a dream. It wasn’t real. That’s what she told herself as she took deep, albeit ragged breaths and tried to calm down.

“Just a dream,” she whispered. “Just a dream. Just a…”

“I think the word you’re looking for is nightmare,” said a voice in the dark.


	2. Chapter 2

Cupcake clasped her hands to her mouth and nearly bit down on them to stop herself from screaming. She glanced wildly about, hoping she had only imagined that voice but was far too certain and terrified she had not. Something moved in the corner of her room and to her horror, a pair of golden orbs that glowed like embers appeared, suspended above a disembodied, razor smile that _grinned_ at her from the shadows.

“Boogeyman…” she squeaked.

Descending into panic, Cupcake scrabbled back but found herself cornered — literally. There was nowhere else to go.

Eerily tall and spindly of figure, the cloaked man stepped into the gloom where her nightlight’s glow attempted to push him back. It worked to no avail. Deep set in a gaunt and terrible face the pallor of ash, his eyes gleamed more and more maliciously with each step he took.

“Please…please don’t hurt me,” she whimpered. She screwed her eyes shut and prayed that when she opened them again he would be gone. A contemplative hum, low and undecided, emanated from everywhere at once and became a sinisterly amused chuckle. She shuddered at the sound.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” she eventually heard him say. A lie. It had to be a lie, but in cracking her eyes open, Cupcake found he had come to a halt in the centre of her room. The corners of his lips were upturned and he appraised her with a slight tilt of his head. All the while, his hands were clasped neatly behind his back. Had anyone else held his stance they might have looked perfectly innocent. As it was, he looked all the more frightening.

“You’re not?” she asked, trembling.

“I don’t see why I must. You’ve already given me exactly what I…” He trailed off. A frown of recognition narrowed his gaze, which then blackened into in a livid glare. Cupcake watched in alarm as the darkest shadows of her room came alive. “I remember you…” he growled, “you’re one of the brats that was there that night!” He started towards her, his eyes ablaze with a wrathful fire. Black phantoms slithered out of every corner and crevice to meet him, smothering the glow of her determined nightlight. “You and your little friends, you—”

“Stay back!” she commanded. She instinctively threw out her arm despite her unicorn still being grasped in her hand.

The Boogeyman, hell-bent on exacting his revenge, stopped dead in his tracks.

For a moment neither of them spoke a word — he was staring stupefied and frozen at the fuzzy toy whose golden horn was inches from his nose. Cupcake glanced from it to him.

“Are… Are you afraid of Mr. Sparkles?” she asked slowly. Recollecting himself, the Boogeyman steeled his resolve.

“No, I am _not_ afraid of _Mr. Sparkles_ ,” he spat. And yet, he was backing away from her with small, discrete steps. Without warning, Cupcake scrambled off her bed toward him, holding the toy aloft. He sprang away and clanged into the opposite wall. “Alright, alright enough!” he cried, raising his arms in surrender. “Stop right there. Don’t come any closer.”

Cupcake stayed where she stood, but still held her ground. Determined scowl aside, she wasn’t entirely sure what to make of his odd reaction. Was the Boogeyman really trying to run away from a plush unicorn? She inched forward. Tellingly, he flinched.

“What’s wrong with you? It’s just a toy,” she said, though she decided to keep brandishing it all the same.

“No, evidently it’s not _just_ a toy,” he retorted, and breathed a long-suffering sigh. “When a child becomes attached to a toy gifted by one Nicholas St. North, as you so clearly have, it becomes their protector. I can’t go anywhere near it, or you so long as you hold it. So, keep it away.”

Nicholas St. North? Cupcake didn’t know anyone by that… Wait, _North_. That was Santa’s name. And she had received Mr. Sparkles from him two Christmases ago.

“Why should I?” she challenged. “That was you, wasn’t it? You were the one who made me dream about my friends; about Jack Frost not being real; about the pit of darkness coming to get me.”

“Of course, it was,” he said. “What do you want, an apology?”

Anger pulsed within her very soul at the cruel smile that stretched across his face. For in it, she saw every jibe and taunt that Mike and Todd had ever made.

“No. I want to know why you’re so mean,” she gritted out. “Why does everyone have to be so mean all the time? Doesn’t it get tiring, making people miserable?!” The conceited curl of the Boogeyman’s lip did not waver.

“Quite the contrary,” he said. “But I’m not that spiteful, not entirely. It’s simply my job to make children such as yourself unhappy; to make them fear that which must and should be feared.” He paused. “And I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it from time to time.”

Cupcake stared long and hard at the Boogeyman who, despite his arrogance, hadn’t moved a muscle. The unshed tears she had managed to contain earlier that day were again trying to batter down the floodgates holding them back. They welled in her eyes. Her vision shimmered and glistened. Too exhausted and disheartened to put up a fight, Cupcake began to cry. She drew Mr. Sparkles to her chest and squeezed him as she sobbed and shuffled away to sink down onto the edge of her bed. For a few minutes she wallowed in self-pity, she allowed herself to be consumed by frustration, and not until she was sufficiently cried-out did she notice the dark spirit still standing there, with his arms folded and a change in his demeanour. Impatience had replaced his air of smug self-importance — as though her bout of crying had inconvenienced him.

“Are you done?” the Boogeyman asked.

Cupcake glared at him through watery eyes. Why didn’t he just leave? …And why was he going over to the tissue box upon her chest of drawers? In one swift motion, he plucked one out between thumb and spindly forefinger, and offered it to her.

“Take it,” he ordered. Although hesitant, Cupcake complied and wiped her ruddy, tear stained face.

“Thanks,” she said with a slight sniffle.

“Don’t thank me, just stop snivelling. It’s annoying. Especially if you’re too upset to be properly frightened when I’m standing right in front of you.” He looked her over searchingly with an irritated scowl. “You really are more frightened of those pests, aren't you?”

“Pests…?”

“Mike and Todd.”

Cupcake blinked. How had he known their names?

“I’m not really—” she began.

“Don’t bother lying,” he cut her off sharply. “I already know what you’re afraid of. I always know.”

_Oh_. That’s how. She dropped her gaze to her lap and took fervent interest in the tissue being scrunched in her hands.

“It’s stupid, okay?” she admitted. “It’s just…they’re bullies. They’re mean and they call me names and push me around and I’m sick of it. So, today I decided to do something. It was bad…” She sighed and looked up at him. “I’m scared that now they’re just going to keep doing what they already have been, but worse.”

The Boogeyman’s brow rose fractionally, as if pondering her plight. But instead of offering a solution like she had dared to hope, he set off in a leisurely stroll around the room, poking and prodding the various trinkets she owned as he went. She shrank back when the shadows from under her bed crawled out and followed in his wake.

“And why do you think it is they do that?” he asked, though he didn’t sound particularly concerned if he received an answer. Cupcake began to crush the tissue into a tightly packed ball.

“Because I’m different,” she said with a small tremor to her voice. “They think I’m weird so they do whatever they want because they know no one will believe me if I tell. And they’re right.”

“Are they?”

He looked over his shoulder and his cold gaze fleetingly met her uncertain one. It moved away when he became more interested in (or perplexed by) a plastic beaded bracelet in purple, similar to the one she was wearing on her wrist. He picked it up from her dresser and examined it.

“Yes, they are,” Cupcake eventually answered. “At my last school, the same thing happened. When I told my teacher, she didn’t believe me because I was the tallest and the oldest, and the other kids were smaller than me. She said _I_ was probably the one who was being mean to _them_.”

“These boys are taller than you this time,” he said.

“Yeah, but they’re popular. Everybody likes them and it’s like they can’t do anything wrong,” she grumbled.

A frown touched the Boogeyman’s mouth. Then it was gone.

“If there is one thing I know, it’s that a bully is nothing more than a coward in disguise. They live in fear of rejection; of the opinions of their peers; of their own anger that festers inside of themselves…” He looked pointedly back to her. “…Of deviance from the norm. That is why a bully acts as he or she does. They are afraid.”

“That doesn’t make it okay,” she argued.

“No, I suppose it doesn’t.” He briefly examined a rather pointed fingernail. “But you wanted to know why the whole world is against you, I’m merely answering your question.”

Cupcake drew her knees to her chest and huffed a frustrated breath through her nose. “It doesn’t matter. They’re probably right anyway. My friends don’t want me around, I know it.”

“Oh, you do,” he said with mock sincerity. “Then tell me, do you remember what happened that night last Easter?” Cupcake’s gaze panned up to him, her attention undivided. “Of course, you forgot about _me_ easily enough after the thrill of resurrecting the Sandman, but do you remember the battle itself?”

“Yes,” she replied, frowning slightly.

“Then you will remember there was a moment when darkness was all but upon you. When _I_ was at my most powerful. Right before…” He shook his head to himself and flicked an aggravated hand through the air. “In that moment, I knew exactly how frightened you all were — you, the other children, the Guardians — I heard you clearer than crystal.”

His expression hardened into something resentful and scorned. He clearly had not forgiven the meddling that had foiled his grand scheme, but to Cupcake’s surprise, he made no further comment on the subject. He was still studying the bracelet intently.

“If the vomit-inducing fears of those children hold any truth, it means they were scared for your safety that night. They feared for you, just as you feared for them. I’m no expert, but is that not something friends would do?”

“They were scared for me?” she repeated. She could have sworn the Boogeyman almost looked amused.

“Terrified,” he stated.

Cupcake settled her chin on her knees and allowed the truth to sink in. The others — her friends — had cared about her. Really cared. Which meant they must surely care about her now, and would believe her if she told them what she was going through. They had never given her any reason to suspect otherwise. The only reasons she had not to trust them were those she had made up all on her own.

Stupid Mike and Todd…

“What do you mean you’re not an expert?” Cupcake asked. “Don’t you have friends?” The Boogeyman snapped his head up to stare at her and dropped the bracelet, like it had burned him. She immediately realised her mistake. “Oh…sorry. That was kind of rude.”

He cleared his throat, recovering in an instant. “It was. But I would be far more insulted if you thought you had actually hurt my _feelings_.” Cupcake let out a short laugh at his revolted expression. He might have been scary but he was still a very animated sort of character.

“You know, it’s okay if you don’t have many friends. I get it.” She hugged Mr. Sparkles a little more closely. “I didn’t fit in very well at my old school.” Leaning against the dresser, the Boogeyman dropped his chin into a propped-up hand.

“So you mentioned,” he drawled.

“I did have one friend. Her name was Ronnie and we would play together at lunch. We said we would be best friends forever, but she stopped talking to me after…after…” Cupcake let the end of her sentence drift away into obscurity. What happened that day was something she didn’t even like thinking about, let alone talking about. That day was a sour reminder that children, even in the innocence of their youth, could be cruel and vicious if they chose. But more than that it reminded her that ‘best friends’ were not always synonymous with ‘true friends’. Her silence was long and empty, but the Boogeyman did not press for her to tell him more. And when she continued — when she was ready — he let her skip over the incident with no questions asked.

“Anyway. I used to sit by myself a lot. It wasn’t fun, and it got really lonely sometimes, but it was better than being around people who didn’t want me.”

“Indeed,” the Boogeyman muttered. He wandered over to the window, appearing deep in thought. Outside, resplendent golden streams of light were meandering across the sky.

“That bracelet you were looking at used to belong to her. It goes with this one.” Cupcake held out her wrist to show him the beads in varying shades of pink, woven together by a black band. The gesture broke him out of his tranced, far-away look. “I made them both, but if you like the other one you can take it. I don’t really need it.”

“Like it?” His chest puffed and he drew himself up so his shoulders were squared. “I didn’t like it,” he snapped, making Cupcake wince. But then, like a change in the weather, a shadow of remorse crossed his face and the haughtiness drained from his otherwise impeccable posture. “It just…reminded me of someone,” he amended. “That’s all.”

“Well, you can still have it if you want. I wouldn’t mind,” she said. The Boogeyman, prickly as ever, gave her no answer above a non-committal hum, and only then did it occur to Cupcake that maybe he didn’t want to relive this memory. In an effort to save face, she changed the subject. “You also said we forgot about you. What did you mean by that?”

If possible, the spirit of fear incarnate became even less enthused by her chosen topic.

“Allow me to answer your question with one of my own,” he said. “What do you think happened to me after the Sandman made his glorious return?”

“I don’t know. You…you disappeared and…” her eyes grew wide and her jaw slackened.

“I’m sure it must have appeared so, yes,” he said with a sneer at her sudden epiphany. “But I was there the whole time, and you and your little friends were none the wiser because you no longer feared me.”

“But we still believed you were real,” she reasoned, trying not to flinch at the venomous bite to his tone. “How could we not after everything you did?”

“Belief is only half the remedy for the affliction that ails me. I’m not like your precious Guardians. Without fear, I cease to be real in the eyes of the children who outgrow me.” He smirked and emitted something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Like you, I don’t exactly ‘fit in’ the way others wish I would.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. I can see you right now, but I’m not really that afraid of you anymore.”

“Perhaps,” he agreed with a faint scowl, “but you don’t know where I’ve come from or why I’m still here, which makes you nervous. And with all your pent-up stress, that wariness is more than enough for me to remain tangible as far as you’re concerned. Fear can make anyone suggestible to the most wild and inane ideas.”

“I suppose so,” she said, attempting to wrap her head around it all. “So, why are you here?”

There was a beat before he spoke. “I’m on an assignment, shall we say.”

“An assignment that involves me?” she asked as he walked over to the window to peer out again. He drummed his fingers against the sill impatiently.

“Yes. In fact, you’re imperative to its success,” he replied.

“What is it?”

“Nothing over which you need concern yourself,” he said, revelling in the deviousness of his own irony — an irony which did not escape Cupcake. She let it slide. He wouldn’t say anything he didn’t want to, and she was trying to learn when to pick her battles. Turning from the window, the Boogeyman looked to her with his hands clasped behind his back. “What we should discuss is how you plan put those fiends back in their place.”

“I already tried pushing back at them,” she grumbled.

“Oh, you gave one of them a little bit more than a push, if I’m not mistaken,” he chuckled mirthlessly.

“Yeah, and it didn’t work,” she reminded him. “All it did was get me in trouble.”

“One door closes, another opens…” he recited as he waved a lazy hand through the air. “Isn’t that what the optimists say?” Cupcake could only give him a quizzical look. “I may have an idea, is what I mean,” he elaborated, then frowned and threw a sneer out the window. “Unfortunately, that idea requires waiting on someone who is uncharacteristically late.”

“Who…?”

As if cued simply to be spiteful, a trail of stars heralding the beginnings every fantasy imaginable danced through Cupcake’s open window. She knew in an instant who had sent them. Glittering particles playfully weaved between her and the Boogeyman, though he was far less enthralled by the display than she was. He shrank away from all the golden dust illuminated and glowered as the stream swirled and looped over itself, shifting into a vision that filled Cupcake with wonder and peace and comfort. A good dream. One of her favourites. Herself, sailing through time and space atop the back of a majestic, galloping unicorn, holding on tight as the wind ruffled her unruly crop of hair.

“I like this one,” Cupcake told him with a dazed smile.

“I bet.”

“But, how’s a dream supposed to help me when I see Mike and Todd tomorrow?” Her smile all but vanished.

“It won’t help you,” he said as he irritably brushed golden sand from his shoulders.

Panic gripped Cupcake then. A horrible pang of dismay knocked the breath out of her. What was supposed to help her then? She was sure she couldn’t face them on her own.

“I don’t understand…”

“That dream, as _lovely_ as you think it is, won’t be of any use to you on its own. Idle dreams are for the complacent, and for those who wish to live in denial of harsh realities. You can’t afford to be either of those things when you face Mike and Todd.”

“Are you saying something’s missing?” she queried. The sly grin he gave alone could have answered her question.

“Only one thing. A touch of fear.”

The Boogeyman reached out his impossibly long fingers to graze the unicorn as it pranced by. Immediately, a substance blacker than ink bled a spider’s web into the golden creature at his touch, an infection, a poison in motion. The sand transformed, each individual granule succumbing to the depraved influence of its new master. Cupcake held her breath as she watched and waited for the dream itself to be twisted into a true Nightmare.

Then, something unexpected occurred.

The Boogeyman’s corruption continued to spread, but instead of destroying the Sandman’s dream, black and gold intertwined in a marbled flow of elaborate convolutions all over the body of the unicorn. The creature shuddered and convulsed as it took on a more powerful shape, something more streamlined than the whimsical dream concocted by the Sandman, but less sharp and skeletal than the threatening silhouettes of the Nightmare army. As it completed its transfiguration, the nightmare-ish dream cantered once around the room, testing its new form. It returned to greet not the Boogeyman, but Cupcake, and bowed its head, on top of which was a spiralling horn comprised of the polarising light and dark. She could hardly believe her eyes.

“Can pet her?” Cupcake asked.

“I insist,” said the Boogeyman.

Cupcake raised her hand to the muzzle of the beast, which whickered softly. Its grainy texture was what she first noticed, rough and crackling with power beneath her fingers. It was that power which then hit her with a sudden surge of adrenaline. Intense, though not quite overwhelming, a strange, fearful energy coursed through her veins. But it was not the sort of fear that made her want to run. It was the sort of fear that compelled her to act.

“When you see those brats tomorrow, you will remind them that you are not someone to be trifled with,” the Boogeyman said, and then added as an afterthought, “without punching the ringleader in the nose.”

“But what if I can’t?” she asked quietly, in doubt.

“That is when you call upon—”

“Penelope!” she gasped. He slowly turned to look at her.

“What?”

“She looks like a Penelope. You should call her Penelope,” she explained sheepishly when scrutinised under his stony gaze.

“Does that sound like an appropriate name for a minion of dark—“ He was interrupted by the approving snort of the traitorous unicorn, who butted her nose into Cupcake’s hand. His exasperation was duly ignored. “Fine,” he snapped, “ _Penelope_ , since that’s all she’s going to answer to now. When you feel those boys are ready for all they deserve, use the fear behind your courage and call upon her. She will answer to you.”

“She will?”

“To you alone.” He made a sweeping gesture to the unicorn. “Try for yourself.”

“Okay. Penelope…” Cupcake’s face scrunched in concentration as she looked into gleaming, yellow eyes. “Disappear.”

Though she emitted a somewhat incensed bray, Penelope followed her orders and was swept up in a whirlwind of gold and black. The sands spiralled into a tight corkscrew that became finer than spun thread. Then they dispersed with a poof, returning to the realm of sleep from whence they came — where Cupcake herself should have been many hours ago. An irresistible yawn became a stretch, and by the time her arms had dropped back to her sides, her eyes were drooping closed.

“I believe that is my cue,” said the Boogeyman blandly. “Time for you to get some sleep.” He made a gesture for her to tuck herself into bed. Cupcake readily complied and dropped her head to the pillow with a light thud. Once she was settled, he made to take his leave via the space beneath her bed.

“Will Penelope really come when I need her tomorrow?” Cupcake asked though another stifled yawn. The Boogeyman paused before he could drop into the shadows.

“Without question,” he assured her, but seemed to stop himself short. He had spied something on the floor — Mr. Sparkles. Quicker than she could blink, he bent to sweep up the plush unicorn with inhuman grace.

“After all,” he said as he tucked the toy below her chin “she is both your dream and your nightmare.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited by **SumiSprite**

Cupcake awoke for school the next morning in a daze of confusion. Hazy, muddled remnants of a dream — of something important — were rapidly slipping from her mind, like coils of smoke ghosting just out of reach. But her desperation not to let those fleeting visions go made little difference as amnesia spitefully plucked every detail from her memory. She pried her eyes open, sending her stomach churning in the way it always did when her night had been plagued with fitful tossing and turning. With a groggy groan, she looked over to the clock at her bedside, and gasped.

She had overslept her alarm by twenty minutes.

Where Cupcake might have taken her time eating breakfast and brushing her teeth, instead she hastily pulled on wrinkled clothes and shoved last night’s homework into her bag. She raced out the door with a hurried insistence to her mother that no, Mike and Todd’s parents did not need to become involved in the mess that was her school life, because she was on her way to fix it — if she could make it there in time. It was only once Cupcake was trotting along her quiet suburban street, blasted by a frigid winter wind, that her memories of the night before rushed back to her in vivid detail.

The Boogeyman had paid her a visit. 

Simply waltzed in unannounced, looking just as terrifying as she remembered.

But though he had been short-tempered and shady, with a foul mood to match, when he had spoken with her he had seemed rather sincere. He had given her advice. Find Mike and Todd, and remind them that she was not someone to be trifled with.

Why in the world had the Boogeyman tried to help her? 

One thing was for certain, Cupcake decided as she quickened her pace down the sidewalk; his visit hadn’t been a nightmare. Nor had it been it a hallucination, or figment of her imagination. His visit had to have been real. 

_He_  had to be real. 

For when she had glanced at her dresser in her frantic state earlier that morning, she noticed her bracelet’s twin had mysteriously gone missing. 

— O —

“She’s got a pretty mean hook, you gotta admit,” Todd said when he and Mike met on their regular route to school. 

_“Shut up,_ Todd,” Mike snapped. He scrunched his face in a scowl and immediately winced with a sharp hiss of pain. To say he looked as though he had taken a beating was an understatement. The bridge of his nose was swollen, the undersides of his eyes were puffy, and everything that ached was painted a curious shade of purple-ish pink. To make matters worse, after the ER nurses had stopped the bleeding, they had given him no choice but to walk around with a garish splint and bandage taped to the centre of his face.

It was all her fault. 

They walked on in silence for a few minutes, with Mike angrily kicking at anything — flowerbeds, pine-cones, rocks, a squirrel — that had the misfortune to come within range. Unsure of what to say, or whether he should say anything at all, Todd opened his mouth and closed it numerous times, not unlike his vapid pet goldfish. 

“So...what now?” he eventually chanced.

Mike’s fists clenched. He had to force an even temper through his teeth. “Now we make her pay.” 

“How’re we gonna do that, exactly?”

“I’ll tell you how.” Mike brought them to a halt, threw down his bag, and wrenched the zipper open. From out of the pack he pulled numerous pieces of paper, each of which had been written on by the scrawl of a messy hand. 

“No way!” Todd exclaimed as he snatched one up. “This is stuff from her binder, isn’t it?”

“Damn right it is,” Mike confirmed. Admittedly, he had been content to leave Cupcake’s belongings out in the halls and wait for it all to be trampled on by the masses. But while being ushered away to his dad’s Mercedes, some of the many sheets lying adrift had caught his eye. Some that looked less like homework and more like diary entries. Those sheets told him everything he needed to know about the girl he had vowed to make miserable for the rest of their school days.

“Hey, check it out.” Todd cleared his throat for a dramatic reading. “ _‘Jamie had run all over town by the time me and the others were woken up. I heard a tap at the window and the next thing I knew a snow ball appeared. I ran to the window and there he was, floating in the air like he was flying. I blinked and then Jack Frost appeared, with Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy! I always knew they were real and now I could see them with my own two eyes…’_ Dude, she still believes in this crap.” His eyes were shining; they’d hit a gold mine. 

“I know that, dummy, I already read it. Why do you think I didn’t throw it out yet?” Mike snapped, too busy looking over some of the other sheets with a calculating and critical eye.

“There’s pictures, too,” Todd jeered, unperturbed. He thrust one sketch with a collection of stick-figures under Mike’s battered nose, evidently supposed to represent Burgess Elementary’s resident group of weirdos.

“Yeah.  _I know_. So, what do you think that means?” 

Todd’s lopsided grin wilted. He scratched his head. “Uhh…”

“Duh, we go to the AV room. There’s a photocopier we can use, then we can pin this stuff up for the whole school to read.” Mike’s condescension seemed to fly right over his friend’s head.

“Oh yeah, I almost forgot about that.” Todd dissolved into to a fit of laughter. “You know, if you look real close you can still see an imprint of my butt on the glass from when I photocopied it that one time.” 

Mike ripped the pages out of Todd’s hands. “Yeah, sure you can,” he retorted with a sneer and glanced at his watch. “Let’s just go already, we’re gonna be late for real this time.”

— O —

On the last chime of the first bell, Cupcake burst through the school’s paint-chipped doors, gasping for breath and pink in the face as she stumbled over the threshold. While her fellow students paid her little to no mind, she found Jamie and the rest of her group staring perplexedly at her. 

“Cupcake?” 

Pippa’s voice riddled with confusion rang out above a multitude of burbling conversations. Drawing a deep breath, Cupcake adjusted the straps of her backpack and marched through the crammed hallway to meet them. 

“Man, are you living life on the edge or what?” Caleb remarked. “I thought you were gonna get a detention if you weren’t on time today.”

“Detention’s the least of my worries,” Cupcake told him grimly as she passed by and headed straight for her locker. She dumped her bag, collected her new binder, and nudged the door closed with a shoulder.

“Speaking of, what happened yesterday? Everyone freaked out because Todd said you punched Mike in the face. There’s no way that happened, right?” Monty asked with his head bobbing in an earnest nod. Cupcake hesitated.

“Yeah, it did. That’s why I got sent home.” 

“What?!” 

“I know,” she groaned to their unanimous shock, scrubbing a hand across her face. 

“But Mike’s a nice guy. Why would you do something like that?” Pippa asked. “I didn’t even know you talked to them.”

Cupcake’s mouth pressed into a crooked line as she searched for an explanation. “I don’t. Not exactly. The thing is…” 

She looked at her peers before her, each of them wide eyed and questioning. But in none of their gazes did she find scorn or judgement. Instead she was met with curiosity and a willingness to try and understand. They were listening. They wanted to hear what she had to say and moreover, they were concerned. Twenty-four hours ago, Cupcake had despised being the subject of that concern. 

What a difference a day could make. 

Around them, students were dragging their feet off to class, disappearing into rooms one by one. Time was running out. If Cupcake was going to speak up, she needed to do so fast.

“The thing is, I haven’t been totally honest with you guys,” she admitted. “Yesterday, when you asked if something was wrong…I lied.” 

“I knew it,” Claude said in a loud whisper. He received a whack across the arm from his brother.

“Dude,” Caleb hissed.

_“Guys!”_ Jamie was quick to silence Claude and Caleb before they could bicker their way into a brawl of sibling rivalry. He was not about to let them quell whatever had spurred Cupcake’s newfound bravery. Not when he was itching to get some answers. “What’s going on? Why did you lie?” he asked, his brow knitting into a worried frown. 

Cupcake glanced around, hyperaware of how deserted the corridor had become. Her heart was beginning to race. Those boys could be lurking around the corner, eavesdropping, or coming for her at any second. 

It was now or never. 

“I lied because Mike and Todd aren’t as nice as everyone thinks they are,” she whispered. “Every morning for the past two weeks before roll call, when you go off to Mr. Roger’s class and I go to Ms. Norman’s, they’ve been coming to find me. They stop me on my way to class because they want to—” Her voice caught. She swallowed. “They want to t-talk to me.” 

Monty and Pippa looked at each other with quizzical brows and upturned lips. Jamie and the twins were equally confused.

“You just said you don’t talk to them,” Caleb said.

“No, I don’t talk to them. I just...” 

Cupcake was struggling. Flailing. She was losing them. Drawing a ragged breath, she reached for fistfuls of her hair in frustration. She couldn’t find the right way to say it. Why couldn’t she just  _say it?_  
“You’re not making a lot of sense, Cupcake,” Pippa said gently. “Besides, we all really need to get to class—”  


“No! Wait!”

_Just say it._

“Mike and Todd have been bullying me,” she blurted.

If she didn’t have their attention before, she certainly had it now.

“They’ve been calling me names, pushing me, making me late so I keep getting detentions. They’re just—they’re just being stupid buttheads and I can’t get rid of them no matter how hard I try and yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I punched him!” 

Silence. That was all Cupcake received for her out-burst. Stunned, dumbstruck silence that told her nothing of what was running through their heads. Hot, angry tears were welling in her eyes, but it didn’t matter. She had found her voice and she wasn’t about to give it up, no matter how shot and fragmented it might sound. 

“I didn’t mean to, honest, but Mike is the worst,” she continued shakily. “He and Todd are doing the same stuff that made me move from my last school and worse. They told me none of you wanted to be friends with me, and for a while I believed them. Maybe they’re right. Maybe you’re just pretending because you have to, or because you feel like you have to — I don’t know. I just wanted this year to go well. I was hoping this time I’d get friends that didn’t leave me, or that maybe I might feel happy about coming to school again. But most of all I was hoping people like them would leave me alone.” 

Cupcake tried to gulp down the shuddered breaths that fought their way out of her lungs, and dragged the arm of her baggy over-shirt across her eyes to press her tear-streaked face into the fabric. She was a little surprised at herself, in all honesty. She hardly ever cried, but these episodes were becoming an annoyingly regular occurrence. When she looked up at last, she was met with, furious, heated glares. But curiously enough, not one of them was intended for her. 

“Stupid buttheads,” hissed Monty, whose lour was fixed somewhere in the distance. The others looked angry, but he looked the most livid of all, which was a strange sight coming from such a small, speckly kid. 

“That’s why they kept asking to go on bin duty!” Pippa gasped, utterly scandalised. “Not because it looked good on their reports, but because they were trying to get out of class.”

“Pip, who actually cares that much about reports? Come on,” said Claude. Pippa shot him an offended scowl.

“They started coming late at the same time you said you were — which didn’t even make any sense because you were always on time when we saw you!” Jamie groaned and slapped a hand to his forehead. “Cupcake, we’re so sorry.” He was backed up by a chorus of apologies. It was Cupcake’s turn to startle in confusion.

“Why are you sorry?” she asked. 

“Because we’re your friends and we should have been there for you,” Pippa said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “But you should have told us as well. No one should have to deal with this stuff on their own. Why didn’t you say anything?” 

So, Cupcake explained herself. She told them about her old school; about the bullies of her past; about the accusations made against her; and her former best friend, Ronnie, who even now made her heart sink a little.  

“I kept telling myself that none of you would believe me if I told you, because of who Mike and Todd are and who I am. Everyone likes them because like Pippa said, they’re ‘nice’ and I’m…me. It would be my word against theirs. But I guess I was more afraid of you finding out, because I thought you wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore once you did. You might have been scared of them picking on you as well if you still hung out with me. That’s what Ronnie was afraid of.” 

“Yeah, but we’re not Ronnie,” Monty pointed out. 

“You’re still a bunch of losers though.” 

They whipped their heads around upon hearing the snide voice. At the end of the corridor, with the menacing grin of a jackal, stood a bandaged Mike Henderson and his loyal puppy, Todd. Both were clutching a prize that prompted a twist in Cupcake’s gut; stacks of paper that she could only assume were intended for a terrible purpose.

“Is it true?” Jamie asked without preamble.

“Is what true?” Mike asked in turn, feigning innocence.

“Don’t play dumb, why were you picking on Cupcake?” Pippa growled.

“Oh…I see.” Mike shot Cupcake a smug grin. “Getting your fellow freaks to fight your battles, huh?”

“They’re not fighting anything for me,” she said. Claude, meanwhile, seemed to have other ideas.

“You don't get to be mean to Cupcake like that. She might be a freak but she’s our freak. Leave her alone.” Beside him, Jamie dropped his head into a hand.

“You sure you want to defend her?” Mike asked. He dumped his papers with Todd and began to cross the distance between the two parties. “If I were you I would want to start choosing my friends more carefully. I mean, this is fourth grade. You think middle school is going to be anything like this next year? From here on in, your popularity is who you are. You don’t want to be stuck hanging around someone who’s only going to bring you down. You know what they say, freaks of a feather fall together.”

Cupcake’s friends looked askance at her manipulative tormentor, now that he’d finally revealed the deplorable hostility that festered within him. They exchanged resolute glances of agreement amongst themselves.

“Yeah, we’re sure,” Jamie said. Mike’s eyes narrowed menacingly.

“Suit yourselves, then.”

“Mike, you don’t have to do this,” Cupcake said.

“Actually, I do,” he informed her, as if speaking in a matter of fact. In noticing her not-quite pleading expression, his smirk broadened. “Unless you got something worth my while to change my mind.”

“She doesn’t owe you anything!” Pippa snapped, but quietened when Cupcake shot her an authoritative, side-long glance. She, and the others, reluctantly backed down. Cupcake then brought her gaze back to the expectant Mike and his sycophant, poised to give them a piece of her mind.

Only, she had no idea what to say.

Her arms tightened around her binder. She blinked once, twice…and then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw it.

Over by the drinking fountain were the faintest wisps of gossamer-dusted black, teasing at the edges of young shadows of the morning. Whispers from a voice just as thin sighed in her ears; faint, not quite distinguishable, but present. And an anchor, the ghost of a hand rested on her shoulder – _assurance._

_Prove yourself…_

_Prove you are better than them… ___

_Prove you are stronger than them…_

A third blink and her spine straightened, her chin rose. The sudden shift in her countenance seemed to evoke the tiniest, confused flinch from Mike, and it only further strengthened her resolve.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Strangled exclamations were emitted by her friends, but Cupcake only had eyes for the utterly baffled expressions Mike and Todd both wore. If she’d had any less control of herself, she would have laughed, but now was not the time. In that moment, she had to be more than just ‘Cupcake’. She had to be steel. She had to be tall.

_A suit of armour protects that which is soft, tender and kind inside…_

She had to become a knight.

“Wh—what…?” Mike rasped. Cupcake did not falter.

“I said, I’m sorry. For punching you, I mean. It wasn’t nice, but what you and Todd were doing wasn’t nice either,” she said. The star-kissed blackness, now joined in a duet by whorls of the richest gold, flickered in her peripheral vision, seeming to darken and brighten everything at once.

_Your tongue is silver; a sword. Cut them. Your heart and mind are just as fierce. Use them._

“We could have avoided all of this if you had just left me alone like I asked. I still don’t completely understand why you do these things to me, but I’m not stupid and I want it to stop. So, I’m apologising for hitting you, but you’re not going to get anything more from me – you don’t deserve it.”

Silence descended upon the group in a thick blanket. Though Cupcake could not see them, she could feel the intensity of her friends’ expressions. Awe and disbelief radiated like pulsing sunlight, an admiration that she soaked into her bones. Now fully formed and rearing, out of the corner of her eye she saw a familiar creature of myth and magic writhe in anticipation. Cupcake’s strength was bolstered and she smiled, for so too was Penelope’s.

Across from her, Mike’s own eyes were betraying him. A wispy, black coil of something that made up part of Penelope had infiltrated his mind and being. It whirled in the depths of his stormy blue irises until it planted itself firmly into his very core. It was parasite, a weed that could never be pulled. _Fear._

And not a moment later, it was buried beneath a landslide of rage. He was fuming, seething, a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. She had struck with deadly aim the one thing that could wound him more deeply than any broken nose; his pride.

“You think you’re so tough, but you are nothing,” Mike spat. “And now you’re going to wish you had never even been born. Todd! Do it.”

A fiendish cackle was all Todd gave before he tore down the length of the corridor in a blur of blond hair and freckles, carelessly spilling his ammunition and making it rain sheets of photocopier-white as he went. They flew _everywhere_. When he reached the end of the corridor, where the stairwell began to descend, he tossed one last spiteful look over his shoulder and hurled the rest down to the floors below, making what Cupcake and her friends had no doubt was an even bigger, more devastating mess.

“Do you want to know what that was?” Mike baited, revelling in the dawning horror that must have been plastered across her face. Cupcake looked to her feet, as did the others, and found replicas of the diary entries she had stowed in her binder when her journal had been filled from cover to cover.

The diary entries detailing everything that happened last Easter.

“I don’t know about you, but there’s something real weird about a 10-year-old kid that still believes in ‘Santy Clause’,” Mike jeered. “Or better yet, believes that ‘Santy Clause’ is best friends with the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the Sandman, and that they get together to fight the Boogeyman. News flash, idiot, the Boogeyman isn’t real. And neither are the others. I don’t know who the hell Jack Frost is supposed to be, but I do know this: you’re never going to live this down. And neither will your friends – Jamie, you’re practically the star of the show here!”

Todd strutted back over to where the two parties were standing off, a grin of pure evil spread across his smug face.

“Hope you enjoy eating in your new spot by the garbage bins. No one’s even gonna want to look at you now,” he said.

Cupcake and her friends were rooted to the spot as a newfound fear of what the future could entail took hold of them. But that fear soon sparked the flames of their own anger. They couldn’t allow themselves to be beaten. They wouldn’t. Not by blind hatred, or pettiness, or words of any manifestation. And certainly not by two cowardly bullies.

_The time is now…_

“You know what, guys?” Cupcake began. “You can try to make us miserable, or laugh at us, or turn the whole school against us. Go ahead. We’ll still have each other. We’re going to be okay. I don’t think I can say the same for you.”

There was something powerful and resonant in her voice, an unshakable belief in herself and what she was saying, which Mike could no longer ignore. The tough exterior he had fashioned for himself was surely starting to crumble, and Cupcake watched as whisperings of fear flickered in his eyes once more.

_As long as you are brave, you will prevail…_

“From now on, everyone in this school is going to know what you did. We’re going to make sure of it. And we will find all the others you’ve broken down, because I know I can’t have been the first person you’ve tried to do this to.”

The nervous furrowing of Mike and Todd’s brows was all the confirmation she needed.

“After today, you might have people who want to be close to you, who follow you around, who give you all the attention you want. They might even tell you you’re great. But they won’t mean it. Their compliments will be hollow and shallow because they’ll be too scared to say anything different. Your friends will fear you. And that’s when you’ll know what it really means to be alone.”

A reality check can sting just as much as a slap in the face, and such was true for the two ‘model’ students. The colour drained from each of their faces as they came to terms with the horrible mistake they’d made, leaving behind ashen ghosts of their former selves. Their social lives flashed before their eyes.

Their terrified gazes then panned over to something they hadn’t seemed to have noticed before. Something that towered above them as it thrashed and pawed at the ground, preparing to charge. In the throes of their mounting blind panic, all they saw was a beast of monstrous size which lowered its head to aim a horn in their direction. It promised to be as sharp as every insult they had ever hurled at their undeserving victims.

With cries that could wake the dead, Mike and Todd bolted. Penelope immediately gave thundering chase down the halls and snapped with reckless abandon at their heels, all the while planting seeds of anxiety and doubt in their minds. The group stood and stared as the dramatic scene unfolded, and looked on in silent awe until they disappeared from sight.

Time stood still as the balance of Cupcake’s entire world seemed to shift.

They were gone. Mike and Todd had run off and away.

Because she had managed to stand up for herself.

“Was that a Nightmare?” Monty whispered, cautiously being the first to break the silence. Cupcake shook her head.

“How did you do that?” Pippa asked.

“I didn’t,” Cupcake murmured. “Well, not entirely. I had a bit of help.”

“From who?” Monty pestered. Cupcake’s reply was drowned out by the whooping of an ecstatic Claude.

“Guys, holy crap that was AWESOME. Did you see their faces?! I’ve never seen anyone run that fast in my life, they practically peed themselves!” He doubled over, howling with laughter.

“Keep it up and they won’t be the only ones,” Caleb snorted.

“How do you feel, Cupcake?” Jamie asked with a friendly shove, ignoring the twins’ ceaseless banter. “That was pretty amazing.”

For once, Cupcake had to agree. In fact, an unusual sense of pride bloomed in her chest, though she knew she had her friends — who had proven themselves in the truest sense — to thank in part. As for how she felt; it was difficult to describe. What she felt was the freedom of release. It was severing the ball and chain she had been dragging around in secret for the past fortnight. It was dumping that weight into the deepest ocean, never to disturb anyone or anything again. It was a warmth that spread to every part of her being, one that finally made her crack an uncontrollable smile.

“I feel good,” she said. “Really good. Thanks for helping me prove them wrong.”

“Pfft. Of course.” Caleb draped his arms over them both. “What, you think all of us couldn’t go up against Mike and Todd? Come on, what about Easter? We’ve taken down someone way worse than those guys — and kept him down, too.”

“You’re about to be sorely mistaken, if that’s what you think,” said a chillingly soft-spoken voice.

Fuelled by a new thrill of terror, the children flinched and spun on the spot to be confronted by a living shadow of a man. How long he had been silently looming behind them was anyone’s guess. His hands were hidden behind his back and he too was gazing down the hall where Penelope had chased Mike and Todd. A self-satisfied smirk played at his lips. 

_“Pitch.”_

The Boogeyman glanced down upon hearing the livid address. His brow furrowed momentarily, but his confusion appeared to be quickly resolved.

“Jamie Bennet, what a surprise,” he said through a sinister grin lined with sharpened teeth.

“You’re trying to scare a whole school? In broad daylight?! Are you insane?!” Jamie shouted, balling his hands into fists and raising them to strike.

“No!” Cupcake grasped him by the arm before he could take a swing. “Don’t. He’s the one who’s been helping me.”

There was a beat of silence. “What?” Jamie hissed. Non-plussed, he looked from her to the Boogeyman, who hadn’t been fazed by the threat of his furious fists in the slightest.

“He’s not here to scare anyone.” Cupcake shot the spirit of fear a suddenly skeptical look. “…Right?”

“If I was, you would be  _well_  aware of it by now,” he replied in a tone that was laced with unsettling mirth. Determined not to trust Cupcake’s judgement of character, Jamie’s rigid stance betrayed just how wary he was of the Guardians’ ancient enemy — and Pitch had noticed. “So, the last light is just as insolent as ever.”

“I’m not insolent, I just don’t like bullies,” Jamie growled.

“Well then, we may find some common ground yet.” The Boogeyman gracefully shifted his hands to a steeple in front of him. “If you must know, I merely stopped by to ensure the true bullies got exactly what was coming to them.” He paused, listening for Mike and Todd’s wretched cries as they cowered from a force that was undoubtedly long gone. With a sly grin, he looked to Cupcake. “And it would appear my work here is done. I can guarantee you won’t be hearing from  _them_  ever again. Not without a grovelling apology, in any case.”  

The children were stunned. None of them knew what to do, or what to say, or what to think. None except for Cupcake. Who was beaming. 

“You really think so…uh…Pitch?” she asked. The corners of his lips twitched in a conspiratorial smirk. 

“I know so,” he said. The smirk rapidly disappeared from his face, however. He was only just now noticing the flyer-littered floor. With a disgruntled flick of his wrist, he sent twining tendrils of black sand to fetch one of the sheets for him. When the page was in his grasp, he scanned what was written. His mouth formed an irritated scowl and his scrutinising glare intensified.

“What is this?” he demanded. “On second thought, don’t answer; I don’t want to know. Just tell me why there are hundreds of copies of it strewn across the entire school.”

“It’s not her fault,” Pippa told him, albeit timidly. “Mike and Todd stole them and made those copies. They just threw them everywhere. There’s no way we’re going to be able to clean this up before recess…which I guess is what they wanted.”

Pitch’s brow rose. He looked far from impressed.

“They tried to bring about a reign of terror and this was all the effort they thought to put in? I’m almost disappointed.” He gave little more than an unperturbed shrug before casting his thin hands through the air with deft precision. Fluid streams of sand accumulated, melding to form a small army of Nightmares that raced away in a disorderly mob at his command, much to the cowering children’s alarm.

“What are you doing?” Jamie cried, “I thought you said you weren’t here to scare anyone.”

“I’m not,” Pitch said, and ironically enough, the horde of Nightmares proved his lack of sinister intent. Released with the express purpose of rounding up every last page that would have brought about the children’s imminent humiliation, they made quick work of retrieving Cupcake’s belongings. Pitch collected the pages in a haphazard stack in his rangy arms — those that had not been shredded by careless teeth beyond recognition, at least. Within five minutes it was as though neither the mess, nor the Nightmares had ever been there. Pitch picked through the pile to retrieve one or two sheets in better condition than the rest, and handed them to Cupcake. “Keep those if you wish, but I will be destroying the rest. It’s nothing personal, I just simply can’t allow material promoting the existence of the Guardians into circulation — you understand. They all get far too much of an advantage as it is. Also, I would suggest you think twice next time you decide to store anything personal in a place teeming with depraved pre-adolescents.”

Cupcake’s attempt to answer was stopped short; Pitch stood ram-rod straight and looked about, seemingly listening for something the children were unable to hear. He must have identified whatever he’d detected, for then he groaned and rolled his eyes.

“I think we’re about to have company,” he groused. 

Sure enough, barrelling footsteps could soon be heard echoing through the corridors. Teachers. They would have thirty seconds before they were found loitering, if they were lucky. 

“Man, we’re so dead,” Claude lamented, voicing the exact concerns of the group. Pitch trained his sights on the flickering shadows that evidenced the approaching cavalry armed with detention slips and lunch time duties. His eyes glinted in a wicked fashion.

“Leave them to me.”  

“Hold on,” Cupcake said before he could take another step or disappear altogether. Pitch adjusted his hold on the pile, dragging his piercing, golden gaze away from his intended targets.

“Yes?” he prompted. 

“Thank you.” 

Surprise and disarmament flitted across Pitch’s ashen face, truly taken aback by her simple expression of gratitude. His jaw slackened, but he quickly, firmly clamped it shut. 

“Don’t mention it — _ever_ ,” he said, setting off with reinvigorated purpose.

“Wait!” As he breezed past, Cupcake reached out to grasp the one forearm that dangled at his side. He froze to the spot, rigid as a corpse. The corridor resounded with quiet gasps from her friends and they shuffled back, unsure of what Pitch might do in retaliation. Cupcake, however, still had enough bravery to set aside her fears of the Boogeyman for a moment. “Did you take it?” she asked. His eyes flickered to the bracelet at her wrist so fleetingly she nearly missed it.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Cupcake’s brow creased. “But…”

Pitch cleared his throat and drew at his arm. She had clearly made him uncomfortable and gently but insistently, he was trying to pull his wrist free. Understanding that that was all he was going to say on the subject, Cupcake tried not to let her twinge of disappointment show as she let him go.

All too soon, the approaching footsteps were upon them. Two stern teachers rounded the corner with the exasperated school janitor in tow, and the children were savvy enough to know their scowls did not bode well. Cupcake alone looked to Pitch as panic began to set in, but instead of meeting her gaze with impassive nonchalance as she had been expecting, he was holding a finger to lips that bore a secretive smile – a smile of camaraderie. Not a moment later, a shadow stretched across the floor to meet him, and as silently as he arrived, he vanished.

But just because Pitch went unseen did not mean he was truly gone. A menacing, dark shape rose like a phantom behind the teachers, who were poised with a reprimand to deal.

They received such an inexplicable fright that their detention slips never even left their hands. 

— O —

_“You weren’t really scared of a toy, were you?”_

Pitch rolled his eyes at the stout little man who had tracked him down like a bloodhound to the darkened out-skirts of Burgess Park. Above them, the midnight sky was overcast in a cloudy shade of indigo.

“Obviously not. Do you honestly think an inanimate object could stand between me and one of your dreams?” he asked. Sandy tilted his head and lifted a brow. 

_“I can hope,”_  was his symbolised reply.

“The girl needed to realise she could stand up for herself before I could do anything to help her,” he said, lazily summoning whorls of black sand to watch them dissolve. “It was an elaborate scheme, nothing more.”

Being the skeptic he was, Sandy folded his arms and shot Pitch a dubious look. _“So, the nightmare — was that really necessary?”_

“If she wasn’t sacred, she wouldn’t have seen me,” he explained, sparing no amount of condescension.

_“And that naturally meant you had to convince her that the Guardians weren’t real?”_

A devilish grin that glinted in the low light slid across Pitch’s face. “Oh, that wasn’t necessary at all, but feel free to take it personally. It was intended as such,” he purred.

Ignoring the expression of mild exasperation on Sandy’s face, Pitch sauntered over to where the trees were thickest and darkness was deepest, but he should have known better than to think his escape would be so easy. A tendril of dreamsand latched onto his wrist and his leisurely gait was yanked to an abrupt halt. His eyes trailed down to the bind constricting his ligaments and contorting his fingers. 

“Did we not have a deal, Sanderson?” he inquired, his demeanour dangerously calm. “If my memory serves me correctly, we agreed you would let me work unhindered and I would refrain from outright traumatising your charges. I’ve more than held up my end of the bargain, so let. Me. Go.” 

Sandy dissolved the dreamsand, freeing Pitch as soon as his hackles began to rise. Sandy held up his hands in a placating gesture of peace before clasping them together with a small smirk. 

_“I wasn’t finished,” he explained. “I only wanted to say that, as unconventional as your methods are, North and the others would be thrilled to hear of what you’re doing. If they knew…”_  

“That was part of the deal,” Pitch growled. “The Guardians and the Man in the Moon are not to know I’m…attempting…to help the little whelps. Not yet, at least. Just let me try and fail in peace so we can sooner forget this whole misadventure ever happened.”

Sandy appraised him sternly, but his face was not unkind. _“I don’t think you will fail. I won’t let you fail. That is why you came to me, is it not?”_

As much as it irked him to admit, Pitch had grown to loath his state of being. He was constantly forced to lie low; perpetually starved of his most basic needs. It took losing the Nightmare War for him to see that he couldn’t continue as he always had. Trying to somehow make amends with the children he had terrorised seemed like a good start in turning a new leaf, so to speak, however, Pitch knew he had a tendency to get carried away. He had called upon Sandy to act as a referee for this uncharacteristic endeavour — to ensure that nothing of the sort happened again. And though the Dreamweaver was easily the bane of his existence, and had been more than suspicious of his intentions, he had proven to be encouraging and trustworthy. Sickeningly so. He supposed their history provided a boon in this, though Pitch was unsure if this was an advantage to his intentions or a disadvantage to his dubious morals.

“It was,” Pitch agreed stiffly, unable to come up with a counter argument. 

_“And your initiative is commendable, something to be proud of, even—”_  A well-aimed, withering glare stopped Sandy short.  _“I will not tell them, if that’s what you wish. Just consider it, is all I ask.”_  Pitch emitted a grudging, non-committal grunt and Sandy added,  _“Also, I was half-hoping you would be wearing the friendship bracelet.”_  Pitch nearly choked on air and looked daggers at his colleague as he tried to regain his composure. 

“How do you know about that?” he rasped. Sandy simply shrugged.

_“You told me to keep an eye on you.”_

“Ah. So you were just doing your job,” Pitch finished in a tone saturated by sarcasm. “If you dare breathe a word about  _any_  of this, you know I’ll do much worse than just shoving you in a litter box.” 

Sandy threw his head back in silent laughter as whirlwind of dreamsand surrounded him – he had hardly taken the threat seriously enough. But before he continued his ascent, he paused mid-air.

_“I have to ask, you didn’t leave the unicorn in that girl’s possession, did you?”_

Pitch let out an incensed and unintelligible noise. “Of course not! I’m not an imbecile. Leaving a child with an immortal entity whose power she could potentially warp or abuse…! Do you really think I would be so irresponsible?”

_“You don’t want me to answer that.”_

Deadpanned and resigned, Pitch summoned Penelope to his side. The unicorn comprised of dreams and nightmares in perfect harmony swirled to life and tossed her mane of dual toned grainy ribbons and tendrils. Particles of light were cast into the trees of the park with her every movement.

“She may have answered to the girl on my command, but she is still of my element, as well as yours. She answers to me, but because she’s not a true nightmare, it means she would probably answer to you too,” he explained, though the very idea of sharing left a bitter taste in his mouth. Sandy cocked his head, assessing what had become of his former dream.

_“As much as I wish you wouldn’t tamper with my magic, I must admit, the craftsmanship of your modifications are not bad.”_

Pitch blinked. “Not _bad?_ ” he spluttered.

_“Not bad at all,”_ was Sandy’s smugly superior parting statement.

Pitch’s eyes narrowed to slits. He could hardly speak. All the accommodations and changes – nay, _improvements_ – he had made, and the Dreamweaver had the gall to patronise _him_? It was an outrage.

But for all the forms of cruel and unusual punishment he might have hoped to inflict on his colleague, Pitch was given no time to act upon any of them. One quick salute later, and the Sandman was speeding off in a golden bi-plane to chase the sunset on the other side of the world. 

“Good riddance,” Pitch muttered after him in a feeble act of self-assurance. Despite his deep-seated irritation, he refrained from flying off the proverbial handle. Even he knew there would be no point in going on a rampage now. However, it was a few minutes before he was calm enough to unclench his fists and his jaw.

With Sandy long gone and out of sight, Pitch smoothed down the front of his cloak, checking to make sure the little trinket was still safely tucked away in his breast pocket. No matter how much it might disappoint Sandy, he was  _not_  going to wear jewellery made by the clumsy but well intentioned hands of a child. He refused. For the spirit of fear and shadow — the Nightmare King — such a thing would be unbefitting and unacceptable.

However, that was not to say he didn’t somewhat appreciate the sentiment behind the gift. The bracelet was given in the hopes that he would accept it, so it could hardly be a crime for him to hold on to it, to cherish its rarity if he so chose. All it took was a soft chuckle to himself and eventually he couldn’t help the way the corners of his lips pinched in the thinnest of smiles, much to his chagrin.

“Go check on her,” he said to Penelope. “Make sure any ideas of pummelling that boy again are out of her head for good.”

Penelope whinnied shrilly in reply and darted away into the night. As she picked up speed, her equine form became more fluid and more abstract, until she was little more than jetting bursts of black and solar flares of gold racing high above Burgess in tandem.

Perhaps Sandy was telling the truth, Pitch mused.

Perhaps there was a chance he wouldn’t fail after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God FINALLY. It’s done. I know, I promised a very quick update, but as my luck would have it, after receiving some truly amazing comments across a few different platforms, I decided I had to rewrite my ending. I didn’t realise there would be an actual audience with whom this resonated and I wanted to make sure I was putting my best work forward for you guys. Few though they may be, your comments, kudos and bookmarks mean the world to me, so thank you for letting me share Cupcake’s story with you all. 
> 
> Now, I am going to list this fic as complete. HOWEVER. **It’s quite possible I may continue Unlikely Allies as a series.** There’s a lot of potential to focus on the rest of the Burgess kids, including Jamie, and a few fun scenarios I would love to throw Pitch into. But it really depends on how inspiration strikes me and also whether it’s something people actually want me to spend time on. I don’t usually do requests, but if you have ideas feel free to yell them out. To that end, if you’re interested in more, chuck this fic a follow. If I post anything new it will be here.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed, and remember, authors love hearing from their readers! See that box down there? You should write something (or don’t, but it would make me so happy if you did).
> 
> — Papers 


	4. Monty: Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PART TWO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes! I'm continuing UA as a series. Up next is Monty, and while I don't have a full chapter written for him yet, I can give you a teaser/prologue of what is to come.

The curious case of Monty Ferguson would occur in the Spring of 2012, when the sun’s thin rays were not yet strong enough to soften winter’s chill, and the boughs above Burgess park shivered beneath their thin cloaking of disheveled new leaves. The boy, who at times was frightened of his own quivering shadow, as good as disappeared — so close friends and neighbours reported. In his place returned a stranger, not yet a man by the world’s standards, but not the same child as before. This boy stood taller, walked prouder, and possessed a self-assuredness never before seen in those wide, green eyes that peered out at the world from behind the safety of two thick lenses. 

When asked about their son’s miraculous shift in countenance and confidence, Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson’s replies were one in the same (though his father’s proud ramblings were always accompanied by a solid clap on the shoulder whenever Monty was in reach): “Our boy is turning into a man…it’s the Ferguson blood in him.”

Monty knew otherwise. 

Neither boiling blood nor ageing bone had been the catalyst in triggering what seemed to have been an overnight phenomenon. In reality, Monty had something far more ancient and infinitely more powerful to thank, though perhaps gratitude was too strong a sentiment. It had been at once as familiar and routine as the sun rising each day in the east, and as inexplicable and eerie as the blood moon staring down from an endless black beyond, a crimson eye that saw all. Knew all. 

Witnesses — Monty’s peers — would later concur that indeed, strange things occurred that Spring. Things that left them with the same shock of cold surprise akin to having one’s foot fall though empty air upon having missed a stair in the dark. Things that caused the hairs on the backs of their necks to prickle when glancing out the window, for fear that there might have been a _face_ waiting to greet them. All could be traced to the haunting arrival of some sort of spectral visitant. Though Monty and his friends were still attempting to unravel the secrets of such a dark mystery… 


	5. Monty: Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry if this is riddled with errors. It's late, and you have no idea how much I hate typing things into AO3. The syntax kills me. 
> 
> Enjoy anyway!

The weekend forecast had predicted mild temperatures and patchy sunshine. Perfect conditions for a father-son camping trip, one would suppose. Mr. Ferguson had certainly thought as much when he informed his youngest of the plans he had made for the pair of them that coming Saturday. On Thursday after school, however, when Monty and his friends met in Burgess Park to routinely avoid starting their homework, fair weather felt an eternity away. 

There was a cold-front moving in. A storm weighing heavily on the horizon. The wind carried the smell of rain, tasting promisingly of petrichor, and steadily strengthening gusts whipped the scraggliest trees of the park into a frenzy. To Monty it seemed, Mother Nature was doing all she could to unnerve him. And though he tried his hardest to focus on a very serious game of tag (of which he was steadily losing ground), his dread of soon having to survive both the wilderness and his dad’s zeal for the outdoors had only grown. His friends, on the other hand, had hardly spared the changing weather a thought as they raced around the clearing. 

“Run!”

“He’s gaining!”

“TAG! You’re it.”

And not until an hour was past did they begin to slow. Their cheeks were warm, their breaths were short and turbulent with giggles. The agreement was wordless yet unanimous; game over. But unlike the rest of the coat-clad collective, Monty was unable to maintain his cheery disposition. For as they re-grouped, he was whacked with a crushing realisation; he was the last to have been caught. 

He was still ‘it’. 

“That’s too bad,” wheezed Caleb as he jogged to catch up to Monty. He bowed his head against the wind, and pulled his orange beanie over the tips of his ears. “Don’t worry, dude, you’ll get ‘em next time.” 

“Yeah, maybe,” Monty replied between gasps 

(if there is a next time).

They joined the others, who were draping themselves over and around the one lone bench found in the heart of the park. He slumped in a spot next to Cupcake and willed his thudding heart to slow. 

If there were times Monty wished he could be taller or faster, it was times such as these. He was short for his age, skinny too. His legs never seemed to move fast enough, his lungs never quite breathed deep enough, and his face always appeared to give a decidedly gawky impression. For all his shortcomings though, he was smart, attentive, and curious (he had even won the science fair last year!). Most would agree he had a brilliant brain. Unfortunately, it tended to…overanalyse some things. A lot of things. Everything. His brain also refused to synchronise with the rest of his body, which made for far too many scraped knees and bruised elbows. He was endlessly frustrated by his lack of athletic prowess and in a scenario like this it had cost him. But there was nothing more to be done. He was ‘it’ until they played again, which really wasn’t so bad—it wasn’t. 

But there was one tiny detail that caused Monty’s breath to hitch in his throat. 

That was assuming they would play again at all. For all he knew, this might very well have been their last game. It was plausible. They were growing up. They wouldn’t stay children forever. And if that was the case, he would be doomed to be ‘it’ for eternity because that was what happened, wasn’t it? Somehow there was a silent, grave understanding among all children that no one simply ceased to be ‘it’ once the game was over. At some indiscernible point, when laughter reduced to nervous giggles and jovial squeals became terrified cries, their sense of fun was warped. Twisted. A game of merriment transformed into a trial of wits and velocity. And heaven help the poor soul left in their dust. Once that very last game ended, when the whimsy and wonder of childhood began to fade, hundreds—no,  _millions_  of kids became grown-ups that went through life having forgotten their touch was tainted by a curse. A curse that could never be lifted. A curse that stayed with them long after they were dead in the ground. Because even though that game was over, even though no one ever actually won, somehow there were those who lost. They were the ones who were marked in a sea of faceless others. They were the ones who were _‘IT’._

“What do you think it’s like to fly?” 

Caleb’s question sliced though the spiralling thoughts beginning to send Monty into a cold sweat. He glanced around, wondering what could have prompted the random query. Above them, a twittering Goldfinch was darting amongst the young leaves of a sugar maple. A burst of yellow flittered to and fro between bony branches, passing in and out of focus behind the splotches on his glasses. Odd…it had returned unseasonably early this year. 

“Weightless. Like you’re lighter than air,” Pippa answered from the grassy bed where she lay, ever the voice of logic and reason. 

“But like a bullet as well,” added Cupcake. “You’d go so fast no one would ever catch you.” 

“Or maybe it feels like you gotta do the world’s biggest fart,” Claude said after a pondering moment. “You got all this air stuck inside you and that’s how you start floating.” 

“Like in Willie Wonka?” asked Jamie, eagerly propping himself up onto his elbows. 

“Exactly!” 

Monty said nothing. He hated the entire concept of flying, and merely thinking of it sent a tingle shooting down his legs that made his knees want to buckle. Jack Frost could fly. He rode the wind with the grace of an Olympian competing in some extreme snow sport. Every time Monty witnessed this his stomach dropped ten miles through the ground. Flying meant there was a chance you could fall. Falling meant you would most certainly get hurt. And truth be told, Monty was terrified of getting hurt. 

“I wanna fly,” Caleb decided.

“Me too,” Jamie agreed, lost in a dream of soaring above the clouds. But something must have brought that fantasy to an abrupt halt. There was a record-scratch moment as he furrowed his brow, tilted his head, and eyed the sprawling canopy of the sugar maple above with solemn consideration. The gears of his brain clicked away. Then, like clockwork, his face adopted a familiar inspired expression. Jamie was doing what Jamie did best. Reinventing. Redefining. Imagining the world as it  _could_  be. And eventually he said, “Maybe we can’t fly, but we can climb.” 

The group followed his gaze to the thick boughs of the wizened tree. It was a long way to the top. An  _awfully_  long way. Monty’s stomach began to churn.

“Race you!” Claude shouted, and jumped to his feet. He ran to base of the tree with the others hot on his heels, but Monty couldn’t unglue himself from the bench. 

“Uh…you guys go ahead,” he called, though his voice came out much too small for them to hear him above their excitement. They were already beginning to scale the trunk. “I’ll just…stay here…”

Monty shut his eyes. He couldn’t climb that tree. He wouldn’t. And nor would he watch while his friends threw caution to the wind. To him, this was no adventure; it was a disaster waiting to happen, and his brain courteously flashed the premonition across the canvas of his closed eyelids.

Climb.

Slip. 

Fall. 

_Die._

Monty shuddered. He would stay right where he was and return home in one piece, thank you very much. 

Despite the flurry of nonsensical thoughts that often snowballed out of his control, one ideal had always remained constant in Monty Ferguson’s head: his fear kept him safe. So safe, in fact, that he was wont to stay well within the confines of his familiar boundaries. After all, why tempt misfortune when it could be so easily avoided? So it was, as Monty assumed the role of supervisor that fateful Thursday evening, that he recalled this one truth he had always lived by. Let his friends have their fun. Let them be reckless. He didn’t need to follow them off every bridge. And if they so happened to tumble from their lofty heights…at least he would able to run for help. He could even save the day, so to speak.  _Ha! That’d be…what’s the word? Ironic. Yeah, that’s what Mr. Rogers said. A fraidy-cat disguised as a hero._

**“Ironic indeed…”**

Monty’s blood turned to ice in his veins. Every muscle in his body was shot with adrenaline yet heavier than stone. That voice. He recognised that voice. 

 **“Especially since** … _your version of heroism_ …means letting others… _take the fall instead.”_

It moved as it spoke. It whispered and shouted its jeers all around, far away one second, then chillingly close the next. Suddenly, Monty’s eyes were pressed shut for an entirely new reason. 

“By all means… **lie to yourself** … _but you forget_ …I can’t be fooled so  **easily**. Then again… **maybe you simply** … _forgot_ …about me… _altogether_.”

Monty jolted each time the voice spoke directly into his ear, like it had crawled inside his head. And though he absolutely did not want to face this person—this creature of the night—he couldn’t stand being blind while it stalked him. It was torture. With his head bowed to the ground, Monty cautiously cracked his eyes open. Immediately his sights were drawn to his shadow, cut to pieces by the blades of grass at his feet. It was moving, but that should have been impossible; Monty himself was sitting frozen in terror. The shadow stretched across the ground, as though pulled by the force of a black hole, travelling further and further until it reached the hem of a black garment. A cloak. His gaze panned up. A deathly pale face was already staring back. Choking down a scream of fright, Monty flinched away. He couldn’t speak. His mouth sagged open. He was totally paralysed by fear (and not at all convinced he wasn’t having some kind of stroke). Standing in front of him was none other than Pitch Black, the Boogeyman. 

“Oh. Did I scare you?” Pitch asked. Nothing about his tone suggested ignorance or remorse. He knew exactly how frightened Monty had been and his wicked grin betrayed as much. 

“Y-you…you…” 

That horrible grin grew even wider. “I’ll take that as a yes.” 

With his hands clasped behind his back, Pitch began to stroll, circling the bench where Monty sat. But he hardly looked like he was walking at all. It was more as though he was gliding, as though he didn’t even have legs beneath that cloak. Most unnerving of all was the chill in his eyes, a coldness Monty had only ever seen in the sharks and reptilian beasts of his World Book encyclopaedia. 

“W-why are you h-here?” Monty stuttered at last, craning his neck to keep the wandering Boogeyman in sight. It was an oddly difficult task.

“Your terror called me so willingly…” Pitch trailed off, seeming to relish the drama of his theatrics. He meandered behind the trunk of a wispy little tree – a tree too small to conceal even his paper-thin frame – and disappeared. Only his taunting voice lingered. “… **Who was I to ignore it?** ”

Monty scanned the park warily, doing his utmost not to tremble in the face of fear. His eyes wandered over to the sugar maple where his friends were bravely hoisting themselves up an endless jungle-gym of branches. He had intended to summon them back, to call for aid in chasing away what was becoming his own personal demon, but a small groan escaped his lips instead. They were already up so high. One wrong move and they have more than broken spirits to mend. He left his seat behind, drifting uncertainly across the clearing towards them, and wavered on the spot as he pondered. What to do…? He couldn’t distract them; they might fall. Which meant he had no choice but to deal with the errant Boogeyman on his own. 

“W-well, I’m not afraid of  _you_ ,” Monty called, throwing his meek voice into the clearing as best he could.

 **“Really?”** The reply was mocking in its disbelief. Monty could hear the leering grin that would have been carved into Pitch’s face.

Had Pitch been less of a coward and shown himself.

“No…I’m not.”

This time there was indeed some truth to what Monty said. For he had realised what gave something or someone the power to incite fear: the unknown. Pitch’s power came and went with the dark, because no one feared the dark itself. They feared what lurked within. The stone cold truth was Pitch simply wasn’t that frightening by the light of day. No matter how gloomy or overcast, daytime could never steal that supernatural, liminal quality possessed by the night, and without it he was nothing more than an eccentric spirit out to stir up trouble. And as it was, the only one hiding was Pitch himself. 

“Woah!”

Monty’s eyes were drawn skyward. Up in the heights, Claude’s foot had caught on a wayward branch, and for one terrifying, heart-pounding second, he wobbled off balance. It was then that Monty knew what scared him most of all. It was not Pitch Black at all; it was that his friends may have gravely overestimated just how invincible they were.

“I see… _Why waste your energy_ …when you have so much else… **to be afraid of?** ” 

At an instinctive prickling of his skin, Monty whirled around to find Pitch lazing on the one lone park bench. There were no clues left as to how he’d gotten there. From his reclined position, he shifted so his elbows rested against his knees, which Monty saw made up trouser-clad legs that were just as spindly as the rest of him. His thin hands drew together in a steeple. 

Pitch sure knew how to act scary, that much was true, but he almost didn’t look the part anymore, now that he’d been exposed in full daylight. To Monty, it had reduced him to little more than a charcoal smudge on a scenery of green. Not that that seemed to have blunted the sharp wit of Pitch’s sliver tongue. 

“Such a little whelp of a boy. How on earth will you survive camping in the woods when you can’t even pluck up the courage to climb a tree?” Pitch asked with false concern and an inquisitive tilt to his head. He smiled when Monty took a faltering step back.  

“H-how did you know about that?”

Pitch shrugged. “I know everything.”

“No one knows everything.” Monty narrowed his eyes and rammed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “You’re just a liar.” 

That grin of jagged teeth was back. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.” 

A bright burst of song rang out from above them, and Pitch’s slivery gaze flickered up to the source. The Goldfinch, incessant in its chirping, had distracted him. He watched it for a moment, cat-like in his hypnotic fascination. Monty tensed, sure that he was about to do something horrific to silence the bird, but instead Pitch’s lips curled into a sly smile. 

“If I’m a liar, then you’re like this Goldfinch.” 

Monty’s resolve faltered. “What are you talking about?” he asked, a crease to his brow. 

“When the temperature gets colder, and the clouds threaten rain and snow, the Goldfinch migrates—does it not?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Monty shrugged. “And they come back in the spring with darker coats and stuff.”

“Clever boy.” Pitch rose from his seat, a towering figure whose height was only exaggerated by his narrow frame. “But this one has come back awfully early this year, and I doubt it’s escaped your attention that we’re about have a change in the weather.” 

It couldn’t have been cued better if the world were an orchestra, and Pitch its conductor. As he flung his arm out in a sweeping arc, there was a low drum-roll of thunder that came from somewhere on the other side of the horizon. The song of the Goldfinch became more frantic in reply. A beat later, a gust of wind whistled through the park, disturbing the trees into a restless percussion. The storm wasn’t close. Not yet. But it would only be a matter of time before it was upon them. 

“This bird isn’t made to survive the cold. He’s ventured too far into dangerous territory, and now he’s going to find out just how unforgiving Mother Nature is.”

A shiver danced down Monty’s spine as he eyed the bird again, its warning cries going unheard by the rest of its flock still miles away and warm and safe. 

“I don’t know about you,” Pitch said, having somehow appeared next to him, “but don’t like his chances.”

A growl built in the back of Monty’s throat. Though it provided little comfort, he could see what Pitch was doing. He had refused to be afraid of the big, bad Boogeyman, and Pitch, ever spiteful and proud, couldn’t leave well enough alone. Monty clenched his fists, and walking back to the bench, turned his back on his unwelcome companion. 

“I’m still not afraid of you,” he gritted out.

“But you are afraid of something.”

“Which isn’t  _you_. Go away!” 

Monty marched on, but when a cry from behind reached his ears he screeched to a halt. He spun on the spot, expecting to see Pitch in a Nightmare-fuelled rage. But Pitch was gone. The glade was empty and for a second Monty thought he might have gotten his wish. But there was that weight again. The weight of being “IT”, which had only grown in the minutes that had passed, and along with it had come a sneaking suspicion that this would not be his last dealing with the Nightmare King. The cry sounded again. Monty blinked and startled when he realised what he was looking at. It was Claude. 

Claude who was crumpled in a heap at the base of the sugar maple.

Claude who was whimpering in pain.

Claude whose arm was bent at a horribly peculiar angle. 

Monty raced across the clearing to his friend in a state of panic, having already forgotten about his encounter with the Boogeyman. And he would not remember until later that night, when the howling storm was battering at the pane of his window. Monty would relive the monster’s calling, and remember the chill that crawled his skin—as though he had passed through a cold patch of icy water in the place where Pitch had stood.


End file.
